As the White House Turns

Say this for Obama: he’s good at developing his self-centered personality into high-octane fuel for his personality cult. I guess you can’t really have a personality cult built around someone who isn’t a malignant narcissist, unless the cult figure is an entirely absent presence – the guy everyone worships, but nobody sees. That’s most certainly not the case with the omnipresent Barack Obama, who spends more time infesting pop-culture programming than dealing with global crises.

Rush Limbaugh has lately been chiding the media for their investment in the Beltway soap opera – obsessing over winners and losers in these insular little dramas, while losing track of what’s actually going on in the great country beyond the New York – DC – LA media corridor. Clearly Barack Obama loves this soap drama. The speech you quoted sounds like a Limbaugh parody of a network anchor’s inner monologue. Sure, the country is being destroyed by ObamaCare, but think about Obama’s political victories! SWOON!

It’s not surprising to discover Obama and his cronies think your life is a small price to pay for his lasting glory. Who cares about the cancer patients losing access to their doctors, as long as Barack Obama goes down in the history books as the man who transformed America? Don’t complain about the destruction of our Constitutional order – that’s a loss to the American people, but they’ve been carefully conditioned over the past few decades to miss none of what they’re losing. They were thoroughly numbed up before the operation began.

And the result is a huge win for Obama and the Ruling Class, thanks to both expanded central power and heightened soap-opera drama. We all know the media-Beltway complex will instantly and totally rescind Obama’s dictatorial powers the instant a Republican takes office; Mitt Romney would never have been able to get away with delaying ObamaCare mandates the way King Barack I does. We might wonder how the media will be able to live with themselves when they spin on a dime and suddenly detect an intolerable crisis to the constitutional order, the instant President Rand Paul, President Scott Walker, or even President Jeb Bush issues an executive order.

But that’s looking at their attitude the wrong way. The media isn’t embarrassed or guilty about the double standard – they can’t wait for how exciting those days would be. They’re salivating at the thought of writing tales about the Republican president’s over-reach, the hypocrisy of everyone who criticized Obama’s abuse of power, and the heroic hypocrisy-free statesmanship of all the Democrats who suddenly and dramatically rediscover the vital importance of congressional prerogatives. Of course, what they really want is President Hillary Clinton, but if they can’t have that, the instant and total destruction of Obama’s imperial powers will be their consolation prize.

So let us once more have a bit of fun by putting on our “What If A Republican Had Said It” hats, and imagine the media reaction to a Republican retreat where the GOP president bragged about winning political victories in a Washington soap opera, to which the entire rest of the country is irrelevant… even as his policies annihilate jobs, produce years of economic torpor, and leave large numbers of camera-ready sympathetic victims wailing about how he lied through his teeth to cheat those political victories out of their hides.

Update: Furthering my point about the cult of personality, Obama got some heckling at the DNC summit, from what sounds like a random loon who asked him about his plans for nuclear war with Russia. Obama smacked the guy down, which is fine and dandy. But his audience of cultists responded by chanting Obama’s name, not the “USA! USA!” type of applause one might expect.